Crypto ads in space are back – Sign of a temporary ‘Matt Damon’ top?

Now that Bitcoin and most altcoins appear to have reached a temporary top (the largest digital coin has been trading between its All Time High and $95,000 for about ten days), we should beware of further signs that a correction could be underway. That whole ‘Hawk Tuah’ affair was already a nasty reminder (celebrity crypto coins are always a bad omen), but I personally found the fact that crypto platforms in the United States are once again advertising in public places and using science fiction landscapes much more worrysome.

FTX

For this story we have to go back to the beginning of 2022 and the Super Bowl, the annual high mass of American Football. That game took place during a real crypto bull run because Bitcoin had set a new All Time High of more than $60,000 in November 2021 and was still on everyone’s mind. Optimism among crypto fans was very high and everyone thought that 2022 would be much better than the already magical 2021.

That year’s ‘super bowl’ (between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals) was jokingly dubbed the ‘crypto bowl’ by several American marketing companies, as the ad breaks featured companies such as FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro. FTX, which would be bankrupt ten months later, showed their now infamous commercial featuring comedian Larry David.

Hollywood star Matt Damon had for months already appeared in a crypto.com commercial that was also shown during the Super Bowl. In the short film, he talked about adventures in space that awaited us in the future.

Just passed a massive @gemini ad in the #DFW airport

CRYPTO THE WORLD #GoWhereDollarsWont@tyler @cameron pic.twitter.com/gd7DuzxVfq

— Mike (@CauseWereCrypto) November 26, 2024

As said, optimism was very high, perhaps a little too high. In May 2022, the demise of that bull run began, with the crash of Terra and Luna. In the months that followed, several well-known crypto companies went under (Celsius) or were quickly bought by Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX who tried to outrun his own demise.

FTX finally came to a standstill in November of that year, after it came to light that Sam (and his management team) had engaged in some very strange accounting practices. The value of their digital FTT currency, of which they could create as many as they wanted, was used to pad the value of their company’s books. FTX quickly collapsed and was declared bankrupt only a few weeks later.

At the end of 2022, no crypto company dared to show large billboards anymore.

South Park made a parody of the famous Matt Damon commercial that became the image of the crypto crash of 2022.

Dallas

This year, however, with the victory of Donald Trump in the United States, with Bitcoin trading around $100,000, with the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs earlier this year and the hope of clear regulation for crypto in 2025, that optimism is back, and apparently the large billboards are back as well.

Last month, Gemini, the Winklevoss twins’ crypto platform, launched a major national campaign to promote their company. With images of science fiction landscapes on other planets and a vision of the future that resembles Damon’s message from that famous crypto.com commercial from the end of 2021. At Fort Worth Airport in Dallas, their commercial is plastered all over the arrivals hall.

And thus I wonder whether we are not going a little too fast with all that unbridled optimism. Sign of a temporary top? A ‘Matt Damon’ top? I guess I should just watch out for volatility.